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The legal presumption of innocence, a bedrock principle of Canadian justice, is being undermined by a court system that keeps people who have not been convicted of a crime imprisoned for long periods, the director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s public safety program told a public forum Wednesday.

“Our courts are not doing their job in applying the law” when it comes to respecting the constitutional principle of innocent until proven guilty, Abby Deshman told 60 attendees at the University of Ottawa.

Court system undermines the legal presumption of innocence, forum hearsBack to video

A second speaker, Jacqueline Tasca, a policy analyst with the John Howard Society, echoed that view: “So many people are being detained needlessly.”

Indeed, 250,000 people are being held in provincial and territorial detention centres across the country while they await a trial or a bail hearing — triple the number of only a decade ago. In Ontario alone, 50 per cent of the jail population is on remand. Many, Deshman said, are “legally innocent” under the law, but nevertheless “can spend days, weeks, months and even years in pre-trial detention.”

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“So much for the presumption of innocence,” she said. “We are increasingly living in a place where you’re guilty until proven innocent.”

Abby Deshman, author of a Canadian Civil Liberties Association report Set Up to Fail: Bail and the Revolving Door of Pre-Trial Detention, says courts are not doing their job when it comes to the constitutional principle of innocent until proven guilty.files/Ottawa Citizen

The Civil Liberties Association has characterized the situation as a “crisis in our bail system,” saying that lengthy court delays in handling cases and draconian bail conditions are “fuelling crowding, violence and inhumane conditions” in Canada’s jails, including, the speakers noted, the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre.

This is not because of any increase in crime, Deshman argued, noting that crime rates generally are at their lowest level in Canada since 1969. Even rates of violent crime are at a low they haven’t seen since 1985.

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Deshman, the author of a CCLA report Set Up to Fail: Bail and the Revolving Door of Pre-Trial Detention, recommended a variety of measures the provincial government and those involved in the bail system could adopt to reduce the flow of people into the jail system, including, among other items, a system-wide return to the presumption of innocence, increased judicial attention to Charter violations at the bail stage, the presumption of unconditional release, and reducing widespread overuse of sureties.

Likewise, Tasca, citing her agency’s recent research report, Reasonable Bail?, urged judges to place a “stronger emphasis on the presumption of innocence” and the right of an accused not to be denied reasonable bail without just cause. She also argued that it makes no sense to impose bail conditions requiring abstention for drugs or alcohol on people who are addicted to those substances. To do so is a de facto criminalization of a medical problem.

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Forum moderator Justin Piché, a criminology professor at the University of Ottawa, pointed out that the appointment of two local MPPs, Madeleine Meilleur and Yasir Naqvi, as, respectively, provincial Attorney General and Community Safety and Correctional Services minister, provides an opportunity for reformers to push the government “to do something about our dysfunctional bail and criminal justice system that sees so many warehoused unnecessarily.”

“Ontario has perhaps the most dysfunctional system in the country,” said Aaron Doyle, another U of O criminology professor. “They are jamming three or four people into small cells with only one or two bunks, in terrible conditions.

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